Sibling stance
In Ghana if a young child bends over to look through his or her legs it is a sign that the child’s mother will soon be pregnant. The bent-over youngster, according to West African tradition, is looking for a sibling. Interestingly, this idea must have currency in other cultures such as Louisiana French, because my wife’s grandmother also knows of it. My youngest son conks his head on the ground to look backwards all the time and whenever he does it sets off a flurry of giggling Twi, the dialect that our Ghanaian nanny and all her neighborhood pals speak. If translated I believe they would be saying: “job security”.
“A turbulent zone of near-nothingness”
No, not my marriage — which is nine-years-old today, hooray! — but rather a description of the edge of the solar system which the spacecraft Voyager I has finally reached. Launched when the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, this diehard explorer (and its twin) embody the best of NASA: trailblazing and science-oriented. If today’s NASA could regain that clarity of purpose we’d be so much better off than wondering how long we can keep a geriatric low-earth orbiting big rig from falling to pieces.
NASA
Voyager is truly alone now. Even the sun is just a pinprick of light. Here’s hoping someone — some thing — eventually encounters her golden cargo. Seeya, V’ger!
Idiot and the Odyssey
As I am getting on the elevator at work today a gaggle of dronish businessmen get off on my floor. Clearly they don’t work on the floor and are looking for a meeting. I hear one guy say “Odyssey. We’re looking for the Odyssey room. I wonder where that is.” Some other guy snickers “Next to the Caravan room, maybe.” Consensus chortling and I think even a ha-ha backslap ensue. I spend the elevator ride wondering what the hell he means. Some obscure Homeric allusion? Then it hits me. A minivan joke. The guy made a minivan joke, for the love of god.
Oh suburbia, is there any limit to the ways you enrich our culture?
The Complete Angler
My father and brother and I are headed to Canada with friends for our first fishing trip in over 15 years. Naturally, we had to restock our gear supply. So we visited the frighteningly expansive Bass Pro Shops in search of a craggy old fisherman who could help us find what we needed. We certainly found him: a leathery, nearly-toothless Vietnam vet who could speak in English for sentences on end without seemingly ever using a word I understood. (“Psst, Dad. Did he just say that the crawler harness behind the bottom bouncer might catch on the planer board? Right, OK, thought so. Good to know.”)
Who would have guessed that fishing line and condoms would be marketed so similarly? You have XL for extra long, smooth action and XT when extra toughness is required and of course there’s new-kid-on-the-block Sensation monofilament for “Greater Sensitivity, Strength, and Control.” Having Mr. Fishervet unironically explain the differences between the types of prophyl- er, fishing line made me feel slightly unclean, quite honestly. He didn’t particularly care for the condom analogy, either.
And because I know you’re wondering, we bought Sensation … for pleasure.
Younglings
Readers of this blog know how much my almost-4-year-old loves Star Wars. The kid is obsessed. He actually cried when I shut off the NPR review of the movie (because I didn’t want to know) after they played a snippet of the film’s fanfare. He might have been looking forward to Revenge of the Sith more than I was. Well, I saw it today with some co-workers, without my son. What an excellent coda to two atrocious movies. It almost made up for Jar Jar and the other awfulness. Somebody doctored the script because even Lucas’s dialogue was decent. And the threads tied up for Episode IV were perfectly done. (Check out the young version of Darth’s star destroyer general — Tarkin? Nice touch.)
I was so skeptical of the pre-release warnings about not taking young children to see this movie. My first movie memory is my father taking me to see the original in 1977 so I desperately wanted to do the same with my son. But it ain’t gonna happen. Most of the violence is the normal stylized swordplay, but not all of it. The emperor is scary; Anakin’s final moments gory; and the clincher (stop reading: spoiler comin’) is that the child Jedis are not spared.
I’ll wait for the DVD for my boy. That is, after I go see it by myself again.
International Freedom Center building design announced
The design for the International Freedom Center — the only above-ground building on the original parcel of land from the World Trade Center — was released to the public today. Given the flashy, contentious architecture of the Freedom Tower and a desire not to loom too prominently over the memorial pools, the IFC designs are fairly understated. The building is raised off the ground to permit lots of ground-level interacion and wandering. But what I love most is that the raised structure is the opposite of a building that falls down. It levitates, is ascending — an implicit counterpoint to the collapse of the towers.
Snøheta, the Norwegian design firm responsible for the Biblioteca Alexandrina (a true masterpiece), created the plans.
Full press release here.
Jumper at Trump site
Some yahoo climbed up the tallest crane at the Trump Tower construction site (no ladder, mind you) and is threatening to splat himself. Some intellectual property gripe, perhaps involving Oprah — or so the buzz at ground level says. The construction crew couldn’t be happier at this forced break and of course most of the pedestrian traffic is playing armchair negotiator or calculating his survival chances if he dives into the drink. (Um, that’d be zero.) I just want to know what the CPD Underwater Search and Rescue Unit can do.
UPDATE: After a slow descent the jumper decided he didn’t want to face the cops and he stalled. At this point I am guessing the subtle negotiation techniques used by the CPD turned to profanity-strewn yelling. Someone told the crane operator to lower the whole thing and the almost-suicide was apprehended. He sure didn’t like the structure going horizontal though. Probably scared him more than being 100 feet up. No lives lost, but oh the billable hours wasted!
Zoo Illogical
So the Lincoln Park Zoo is in a world of hurt, having decremented their animal count by eight and not by sending ’em back to the bush. I don’t know what’s going on there, exactly, but I can speak for much of Chicago in saying that we really really really want to give you the benefit of the doubt, LPZoo. You are one of the only free zoos left in the country and such a gem in the middle of the park. There is absolutely nothing better than a stroll on the lake with a quick duck in to see the animals. But, jeez! What’s going on?
Today I chaperoned my son’s class on a field trip to the zoo. Somehow all the 3-4 year-olds knew that the elephants had died. I know I didn’t tell them and I suspect the teachers didn’t either. Meme’s get around, I guess. It was all they could talk about. They don’t even know what death is. Problem is that at midday most of the animals are lounging in the shade, motionless, which of course prompted incessant questioning: Is the hippo dead? Are the coyotes dead? And my favorite, because it was was looking right at us: Is the tiger dead?
Suggestion for the LPZoo. In addition to your press relations effort regarding the deaths at the zoo how about you position a smart staffer at every one of the exhibits that used to house the now-deceased. Make it a point to discuss things openly with children who come by. Don’t remove the elephant signage and not expect kids (or adults) to notice. We know the zoo like our backyard. Be overt and forthcoming. Explain disease, explain the stress of captivity, explain that sometimes we don’t know why animals die. This will win the day eventually and will benefit the kids ultimately. Animals don’t just disappear.
Laughter, horror, frustration
CCTV had a professional badmitton tournament on the other day. It was about the funniest thing I have seen in months. So serious, so intense, so … badmitton. I’m sorry, people, I know you are athletes, but you simply cannot look cool smashing a shuttlecock. And lest you think this is a comment on Chinese culture I’ll note that the combatants were Euro of some flavor. (Implicit comment on Chinese viewing habits, I s’pose.)
Today in the antiques market I came within inches of slicing off a parabola of projectile vomit with my chest. Luckily this happened to me in Shanghai, also in a market — not kidding — so I was more than normally alert to being barfed on and I was able to leap out of the way. Shoes got a bit, though. What the hell?
Back in early 1996 in Atlanta people decried the traffic paralysis that would acommpany the Olympics. This never happened. People took public transport (which of course caused all kinds of other problems) and I-75/85 was no more sclerotic than usual. So maybe things will be OK in 2008, but I fear so much worse. Beijing is six rings of traffic hell. Rush hour does not exist. It just is. Arrrrrghhh!
Some thoughts on translation
Presenting/demonstrating to an audience who does not speak your language and without real-time translation is not easy. Having a translator in non-real time requires you to think in complete, self-contained chunks — something I do not do. My thought-process (which is reflected in my presentation style) does loop-dee-loops, dithers in cognitive cul-de-sacs, and lurches forward without notice. This doesn’t mesh so well with the discrete communicational quanta required by the translator.
Translations of food descriptions into English rarely help and often make the dish far less appetizing. I’d rather be left to my ignorance of the original Chinese and take my chances. Just guessing at the Pinyin would be so much safer than actually reading “brown sauce from duck entrails,” for example.
There has to be a point at which signage translation into English crosses the line from useful to being more effort than it is worth to make sense of the grammar. I don’t have a ready example, but sometimes signage translations here are so muddled that you’d spend your time better looking for non-textual clues than trying to decipher the English. (Of course, sometimes it is worth it to read.)
Hyphenated translations from a culture whose language never needs hyphenation reminds you how strange it is to see hyphenation done improperly. To native speakers, the hyphen can only intrude at certain places in a word and certainly never to begin a line. Here, the hyphen is much bolder, splitting words wherever it damn well pleases. I like this. Punctuation with chutzpah.
See also: Words Are Pretty. (Seems to have stagnated of late, but I am banking on it revving back up.)
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
